You remember? I was sitting on this same chair, tapping on this same laptop, pushed up to this same desk. Around me worked a team of moving men, preparing to ship our life (and file upon file of a yet-to-be-written but contracted book, Global Mom: A Memoir) off to a new life in Switzerland.

At the same time and as part of that pre-publication ramp-up, I was advised to launch this blog right away because the whole conceit of Global Mom was based on moving, moving internationally, moving internationally often and at times unexpectedly, and doing all that while raising a family of global citizens. On this blog, I was to take you with me, real-time. Show you some of the guts of global momming. Strap you to my forehead the way sky divers strap on Go-Pros and shu-weeeeeeee! Take you for a swift transglobal spin. Prepare you for that thud-and-roll landing.

What you didn’t see, I’m afraid, was the scary stuff, all the gum-flapping and limb-flopping that was going on behind the camera. As you who’ve done any of the following know, 1) raising a family takes one’s absolutely full concentration, 2) moving that family to a new country demands even more of one’s absolutely full concentration 3) helping your family adjust and integrate once in a new country requires that much more concentration, and 4) writing and promoting a book in the midst of all that…Well, just cue non-stop gum-flap, limb-flop.

That lasted a year. I released Global Mom a year after leaving Singapore, and just when I felt maybe things were getting steady enough for my children here on the idyllic Swiss front, I signed a contract to write and publish my second book, On Loss and Living Onward.

Just as that book went to press last spring, we announced we’d be moving again. Unlike the previous move triggered by a restructuring of international headquarters, this relocation was wholly our initiative, one we’d been deliberating for some time. We knew we needed to remove our youngest from a school environment that was unhealthy for him and causing our family much heartache (to frame it in the very gentlest terms.) Gum-flapping and limb-flopping don’t come anywhere close.

June 30, 2014, Switzerland

There’s a moving team milling through my house as I type. Same chair, same laptop, same desk. This week alone, I’ve seen my piano, refrigerator and Norwegian farm table go out the carmine red door of my soft yellow Swiss village home with is green shutters, its plump tufts of lavender, and tumbling velvet geraniums. Such a pretty, idyllic picture. Yet there’s sorrow and fatigue creasing the corners of my eyes. Two deep breaths, and I fill my lungs with optimism and gratitude. I work alongside men –– one French, one Swiss, one Kosovoan––packing our lives in cardboard, padding my concerns in bubble wrap, and heading things in a big metal box with wheels northward. To Frankfurt.

View out of my office window

My husband has long since preceded us to Germany, where he’s been living weeks-over in a sterile hotel room as he starts up a new job. One moment, I’m talking with a Jean-Michel about shutting down our Swiss/French phone lines; the next, I’m talking with a Johann or a Manfred about opening a German bank account. Our Claire is at my side, mothering her brothers and helping me negotiate the 17th move of my married life. Luc is choosing classes online for what will be a German international school. Dalton, now 18, is practicing his cockney accent and reworking his Singaporean Mandarin for when he heads in August to South London for a two-year mission for our church.

You remember? You’re right. We’ve been here before.

Dalton

June 30, 2007, Paris

A moving team is arguing about how to get our massive Norwegian table out of our Paris apartment. I’m refereeing. Randall’s been living in Germany for several months already, starting his new job while we finish the school year and an eight-year French epoch. Dalton and Luc, 11 and 7, are finishing their French elementary school and once in a while I drop a German phrase or two into our talks, just to prep them for the next phase in our lives. Claire, almost 16, is inseparable from our 18-year-old Parker, who’s just graduated from ASP (the American School of Paris) and is heading tomorrow for a summer of leadership courses at college in the States. He’ll use the next months to complete the applications to serve a two-year mission for our church. Come winter.

Parker

Sorrow, fatigue. Deep breaths. Optimism, gratitude. Days are spent shutting down French phone lines and opening up German bank accounts. My daily discipline of writing so-and-so many pages? I set it aside, knowing I only have a few weeks left with all of us together. How we are. The all of us. Like this. Sure, I’ll see Parker over the summer. We’ve made those plans. And he’ll come to us in Germany over Christmas to stay for a few weeks before launching out as a missionary. But still. I only want to be with him. The sails of life are stretched taut with stress, but also with gusts of hope, and we’re cruising on momentum, headlong into the cresting, broad, blue seas.

June 21, 2014, Paris

“We’re pleased to welcome the family of Parker Bradford to today’s ceremony. We’ve invited their son Dalton to the stage.”

A dark blonde, blue-eyed kid wearing a white shirt, navy suit and his big brother’s tie strides up to the school administrator at the mic. It’s the same gentleman, a Mr. H., who’d handed Parker his diploma seven years earlier. Now, he hands Dalton a heavy plaque with his brother’s name engraved in brass and in ornate letters.

The kid blushes. His face is neither smiling nor frowning, but hangs between emotions. Or above them. He shifts from foot to foot. The sibling resemblance is eerie.

“Dalton, like all of you here,” says Mr. H., “has just graduated from high school, only in Geneva. He’ll be presenting the Parker Bradford Spirit Award to this year’s graduating senior who best embodies the qualities of tolerance, enthusiasm and buoyancy that typified Parker, Dalton’s older brother. Parker was a student here at ASP for eight years. One month after graduating in June of 2007––just like you’re graduating today––Parker lost his life while trying to save a college classmate from drowning.”

The blonde brother stares out over an audience of quiet faculty and families. I’m in the back-most row in a corner, yet can hear––can nearly feel––his heart beating. I tuck my chin to my chest.

I’m struck in that moment by the flaccidity of words, how they fool only those who trust words to convey the true proportion of certain truths, realities simply too vast for language. I’m sobered by how vulnerable that whole auditorium full of families is, but how they do not know it. How luminous the boy Justin is to whom the Parker Bradford Spirit Award is given. How magnanimous the school has been to our family, how empathetic. How utterly vital a healthy school community is for families, especially those in transition. How we could have used that these last two years.

Above all, I’m struck by how quickly it’s over––the presentation of the award itself, the graduation, the passage, this life.

How I have been here before. How everything is different.

How, because everything is different, I vow to do things differently this time.

How, for this passage, I’ll truly be there for my family.

Which means that for a little while at least –– for however long it takes –– I won’t be here.

On the Pont des Arts, Paris, before the bridge became weighted with the love locks that distinguish it today.

This is post #199. In a couple of days, I’ll give you my final and 200th post. Between now and then, I invite you to order and read this book. 🙂

On Loss & Living Onward came to be over months of unprecedented searching and researching. By “searching,” I mean grieving, which, after the initial implosion of traumatic loss, is intense, prolonged yearning.

Yes, I was searching. Not for release from grief or its pain, but specifically for Parker, for God, for community, for truth, for understanding, for strength, for light. Sometimes, for air.

And I was researching. From the introduction to On Loss:

“…Every morning when the children left for school and Randall left for the office or for the airport, I turned to my daily pattern of digging and searching amid piles of books spread about me in a circular mountain range. I sat cross-legged on the floor with sometimes twenty books open at once: Testaments, both Old and New and other scriptures of my faith; a poetry anthology; a modern French novel; a German lyric; a prophet’s or pioneer’s personal journal; a Norwegian memoir; a commentary on the book of Job; a stack of professional journals on parental grief; collected talks from great spiritual leaders past and present and from the East to the West; discourses from Plutarch and Plato; my Riverside Shakespeare; accounts of Holocaust survivors, 9/11 survivors, tsunami survivors; and Parker’s own words, which we have treasured in his journals, poetry, school essays, letters, and lyrics.

Oh. And my laptop.

For hours to months on end, I went spelunking through others’ words. When someone’s words hit the bedrock of the Spirit, I knew it in half a breath. There were revelatory moments when a correct insight stunned me to immediate tears or, more often, head-to-toe stillness. At times my heart would leap a hurdle or my eyes would stretch wide open; other times I would hold my breath or exhale audibly in gratitude. Whatever my physical and intellectual response, every time a writer got it, I’d quickly type those words into my files.

Unswerving, I kept at it—mining, sifting, cataloging; grieving, mourning, learning, writing; adapting. While I never found the one book that for me addressed the desperate underside of grief as well as the magnificent promise of the loving bond that endures and evolves despite physical separation, I was (to my surprise) on my way to writing one.

And today—almost seven years after Parker was taken in an early harvest that plowed our souls right open—I finished this book. I lovingly pass it on to you.”

As I approach my 200th and final post here at Melissa Writes of Passage, I want to share one last time with you the reason I began blogging in the first place: This book below.

We’re heading into an intense passage, we global nomadic Bradfords, with a new job in a new country, and each of our children heading in different directions geographically and metaphorically. In order to navigate this period I need focus, focus, focus. When our family has eventually found its bearings in our new life in Frankfurt, Germany beginning late this summer, I’ll be establishing my new, beautiful author website. It will merge channels for my books as well as all forthcoming writing projects alongside any public appearances and readers/audience reviews. There, you’ll also find my regular blogpost-like essays. I hope you’ll come back to it all golden and zen-ified after a peaceful summer vacation.

In the meantime: thank you for reading my first book. In the next post, #199, I’ll post a reminder of my second book. And finally, in blogpost #200, I’ll summarize what these two years of blogging and publishing have meant to me and my family. Come back then, if only to let me know what lies in store for you over your summer!

In one month my second book, On Loss and Living Onward: Collected Voices, will be in your hands. As I write these words, talented lay-out and cover designers David and Maggie are making last-second tweaks, and sending the manuscript off to press.

Let me admit something: This book has been pushing itself up and out of my very pores for nearly five years. It’s been close to publication with two other publishing houses. And I’ve been teetering on that slick ledge of giving up on it, oh, 174 times. But I have a persistent (bossy and endearing) cheering committee, and they wouldn’t let me hunker down in the safe retreat of silence. Finally, this book has found its rightful channel to reach the public.

I am grateful. I am joyful. I am tired. I am anxious.

Anxious and exhausted smile. . .

When cataclysm erupted in our family’s life, I turned to literature for a community, common experience and spiritual knowledge. People who know me well know that, with the exception of math, marbled meats and sometimes sleep, I don’t do much half-heartedly. So that same intensity translated into gathering hundreds upon hundreds of statements on loss and grief. Not with a mind to ever publish an anthology, mind you, but with a heart that was stunned to a sputtering speechlessness and needed understanding. I scraped and spelunked through other’s words to speak for and to me. In time, and without having had a plan on the outset to do so, I had the makings of a major tome on grief. Those quotes–at least those for which my publisher could acquire legal permissions– together with 17 of my best personal essays, have evolved into this substantial book. I can hardly wait to get it out there.

I sent a friend and fellow bereaved mother a galley (pre-published) PDF copy. Here’s what she wrote to me just this week:

Dear Melissa,
I’ve had the immense pleasure of spending much of this past weekend with your wonderful book…My husband was not feeling well, so we were both at home, and I read and read. I can’t tell you how often I picked up my computer and said to my husband, “Read this,” because you were able to articulate just how I was feeling so much of the time. And you did it so eloquently and beautifully. You were able to put into words what I felt but could not express and you did this so much better than any other author I have read.
I loved the quotes at the beginning of each section. I must admit though that I hurried through them so that I could get to your writing. I do plan to go back and highlight as soon as I get my hard copy. There were so many wonderful nuggets where I paused and smiled because they nailed feelings I had experienced and interpreted what I was still trying to identify.
One of my favorites was the grief beast section. My grief beast looks a lot like yours, and now I can put a name and description to it. It’s still lumbering around but it doesn’t come as often as it did before and it doesn’t stay as long. But I think that now I will talk about that beast to others so they can have a better idea about how awful grief can be.
I can’t imagine how heart wrenching it must have been for you to move to an entirely new country and new community right after Parker’s death. How did you survive? I’m so glad that you wrote. It must have been healing for you, but now it is healing for so many others. Even though you were so alone, you have been able through your writings to reach out to so many.
I’m so grateful that you have such a gift for writing. All of us who have experienced the loss of a child feel like your book is balm for our grief. I shed a ton of tears as I read, but I felt so understood and valued. I will read it again and again. Thank you. Thank you.

You know those emails that make your throat sting and nose prickle like you’d just breathed in a whole room full of dry ice fumes? This one. If she says it works, I’m convinced. I need that kind of reassurance. Similar to my fears of publishing Global Mom, I have had some nagging fears for this book, too. What if I turn my son into an artifact? Will I be misunderstood as bitter, gloomy, morbid, or strangely proud of or elitist about our family’s loss? Will my family’s story not be fairly represented? Will I make grief look too easy? Too hard? Too dreamy? Too predictable? Too comprehensible? Too tidy? Will its most helpful pages not be the ones that were the hardest to write, which were the descriptive ones (my essays), but the most helpful will be the prescriptive ones, which took just a day to whip together (the two appendices with What To Do/ What Not To Do and a suggested readings list)? Will my deep faith and profound, repeated experiences with the spiritual alienate readers who do not, perhaps, consider themselves people of faith, or “spiritual” types? WiIl this book speak with humility the truth I’ve known?

I’ve run down this list of questions plus a longer one, be assured. But I’ll let you read my writings, and you can decide.

Visit my Loss and Living Onward Facebook Page to find daily updates as well as quotes I could not include in the hard copy itself.

You can preorder now on Amazon, or wait until May 6th to order and receive your stack for yourself and for

This week, I’ll be in the capital of the Czech Republic as a presenter at the global Women’s International Network conference. The W.I.N. conference is an annual happening that draws in both women and men from around the world, and from among global business and opinion leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, academics, NGO representatives, artists, and yes, a couple of us writers. Over several days, we’ll participate in plenary sessions, workshops, forums, dinners and networking activities. For this, I’m packing, among other necessities, yoga stretchies, a great-fitting suit, dental floss, my scriptures, and a ball gown. To give you an idea.

travel nytimes

I’ll first be presenting an extended workshop entitled, “Making a Home in the World: The Whats and Whys of Raising a Global Family.” I’m all ready to roll this one out, an audio-visual, bells-and-whistles journey through our life, packed with years of my personal research into the various angles of expatriate living. How many of “us” expatriates are there in the world? What is the average failure rate of expatriate assignments? What are the primary reasons for that failure? What can expatriates themselves and sponsors of expatriate relocations do to avoid such failure? And then I’ve rehearsed a tap-dancing interlude, if things go really well. (Or if they don’t. Either way, I might have to dredge up my inner Ginger.)

That, friends, promises to be the high energy, speedy, dynamic and entertaining part of this week for me.

wikicommons

Then there’s another moment. For it, I’ll have neither Power Point nor body mic. Not a single bell. Nowhere a whistle. No tap shoes. I’ll be part of a forum panel, which will address issues of feminine resiliency. My contribution is entitled, “When Crisis Hits: Tragic Loss, Resilience, Living Onward With Grace.” As you intuit, this is where I’ll share our family’s story from the point of view of the mother. Whereas in the first workshop I recount how and where we’ve come this far geographically, in the second I’ll describe how and where we’ve come spiritually. Scriptless and ready to field questions, I’ll get to share with complete strangers what drills directly into the marrow of my soul’s bone.

travel nat’l geo

When I arrive tomorrow in Prague, and find myself alone in my hotel room, I’ll lay out my yoga pants and glam gown on my bed, then dump out my cosmetics from their Ziploc bags onto the small bathroom counter. I’ll then turn on my chosen inspirational music on my phone. (Coldplay, Ella, and the MoTab are set to drown out my droning self-doubt.) Then I’ll roll my impossibly heavy carry-on to a corner, the one bursting with 50+ copies of this book I’ve written, the book that will be sold at the conference bookstore, the one that, like my newly-minted business cards, has my face on its every surface.

It could make one feel important. For about nine seconds.

Finally, I’ll take out four enlarged and framed pictures. I’ll find a place in this hotel room to line them up for company and for comfort. One picture, a girlfriend in Singapore made. It is a posthumous family portrait (how else to put it?) with all of us smiling in 2010, and she photo-shopped in our oldest, Parker, absent to the eye since 2007. There he is, though – right there! – smiling more broadly than any one of us.

Next to that picture, I’ll place three more shots just of Parker. There’s the shot of him leaning against a lamp post in Montmartre. And then the shot taken right before he rode that sling shot contraption in the Tuileries. And in the third picture, he’s drumming his djembe in front of the Eiffel Tower, his favorite place to hang out. He’s drumming that djembe with abandon, and with a beaded head band a little Moroccan girl had just gifted him. “I put it on to make her laugh,” he told me when I saw that picture in June. “And she did! Man, she was so sweet.” A month later, he died.

Here’s part of what I’ll be thinking, maybe, as I unpack in Prague. That over 25 years ago I dreamt of a moment like this : I would write a book. Pages, a front and back cover. And I would arrive at some international conference to talk about that book. In an auditorium. Where there would be (in my dream) many languages. A microphone. Beads of sweat. I’d be pretending (as everyone with a book, an auditorium, a mic and sweat must pretend) to be confident.

Certain realities , it turns out, can be more powerful than certain dreams. The me of 25 years ago would never have believed it. Yet the me of today is living it. The Reality that we chose and that has driven us became this: a loving (and imperfect) marriage and four splendid (and human) children with whom we’ve pursued a life that skipped, groveled and hiccupped across many geographies. Reality, for me, meant I needed to be with these children in an intense manner to hold stuff together. There was simply no bandwidth in that Reality (and less and less personal ambition, over time) for pursuing certain Dreams. And of course there was the Reality of death.

While we’ve crawled through death, it seems the Dreams have hung there, waiting for another Reality to catch up with them.

czech transport

Tell me, though. Are these photos in a hotel room – these precious children, this flawed but thriving family, that smiling spirit son, this carry-on of published words – are they not Reality? To what do I ascribe the convergence of a misty Dream and a rock hard Reality? The luggage-tagged and framed-smiling evidence of something I have lived? On this autumn day? In Prague?

Is the human heart even engineered to handle so much gratitude and so much pain – such Dreams and such Realities – and keep on beating? And strongly enough to speak about it all?

Your nationality might be easier to pin down than is Maria’s. Born to a spicy combination of Peruvian and Mexican parents, educated in the U.S., married to a Frenchman and raising young (trilingual) children in the swoon-worthy countryside west of Paris, Maria Olivares Babin is a real global mom. An expert on mingling cultures and nurturing a family while straddling linguistic and geographic borders, she also keeps on top of a blog that is as lively, lovely and photogenic as is her family.

The four Babin children (Image: Maria Babin)

(Image: Maria Babin)

Papa Babin and youngest (Image: Maria Babin)

Maria with the three who can eat solids. Like pizza.

How does someone planted in Normandy, France stumble across another writer-mother-nomad living near the banks of Lake Geneva, Switzerland? You can guess it was not on a morning stroll. The story’s a bit more involved than that.

(Part of) la famille Babin

The story is bitter-sweet, too, and I won’t share it all here because for today, I want to focus on the kind of happiness and deliberate joy Maria radiates, as you’ll soon discover, right off the computer screen. But I’ll reveal this: a few weeks after we lost our oldest son to a tragic drowning accident, my husband and I were invited to speak at a large conference in Versailles, France. Maria and her family, recently installed in their French life, happened to be in attendance.

(Image: S. Furner)

(Image: S. Furner)

Montmartre, Paris Montage (Image: Maria Babin)

More Montmartre Montage (Image: Maria Babin)

Years passed, and our family moved, as we tend to do – Munich, Singapore, Geneva – while Maria and her Babins dug into that legendarily mulchy soil that grows France’s best apples and produces that country’s richest dairy products. The parents (or was it the fertile soil?) continued to expand their family. Along these two divergent routes of two global mothers, I continued to hear stories of the Babins. I asked always for updates, marveling at Maria’s graceful mastery at integration.

Maria and daughter in the heart of the City of Light

Should I admit? I was fascinated – FAscinated! – by this exotic yet grounded woman, whose rich background complemented her quiet gumption. She was the Whole Multicultural Shabang.

Emphasis on the Bang.

Still only part of la grande famille Babin. . .(Maria to the right in red sweater)

Years ago, a girlfriend, nearly breathless with zeal, sent me a copy of what she said was the “hottest new publication,” a magazine called “Fast Company.” One of the article titles on the cover was something like, “Power Lunch, Elevator Style.” I thanked my friend for thinking of me, but disliked and discarded the copy before ever opening it.

The concept of “fast” – fast company, quick lunch, slick and obsequious elevator rides, speed reading – touched a nerve in me. Why? Because unless it has to do with saving someone’s life or making dinner in less than 20 minutes, I dislike “fast.” Or at least I’m sharply suspicious of it.

This wariness, I think, was heightened because when I got that copy of “Fast Company,” I was living in Paris, a place where lunches (and their conversations) last at least a full hour, and where dinners (and their conversations) last sometimes three. Where no respectable anyone eats while riding from floor three to fourteen, and where, in a way I can hardly describe without growing drooly, the slow lane overtakes the fast one.

It’s where taxi drivers have chunky, worn volumes of Hugo, Proust and French Symbolist poetry on their dashboards. And they read them. (Going from the airport to downtown? Be ready for The Conversation.)

I believe in slow. I trust gradual. I’m wired for plumbing downward or probing upward, not for skimming horizontally. When it comes to reading, writing, and the way I keep my company, I’m a scuba diver.

Years since Paris, since my days of vetoing “Fast,” since that time when I disciplined myself to check email only once a week, (Wednesday afternoons for two hours – I know, I can hardly believe it, either), and rarely texted except to keep track of my teenagers out in a big city, I never would have dreamed of doing much of what I do today: writing this public blog, having not only a private but a professional Facebook page, T-t-t-t-weeting. Somewhere along the way, I began mastering the lite-write.

This world, in case you hadn’t noticed, is all new. It’s one made byand for water skiers! It might even breed them. In any case, I’m convinced it’s breeding water skier brains.

(This is another tangent , but don’t you wonder if this hyper-connected world also breeds extroverts? If you do, and this concerns you, read Susan Cain’s Quiet.)

The vast waters of connectivity call out for us to grab a rope, slap on some skis, and knot a cable around our waists. This boat’s taking off like a bullet, folks, and because it’s moving at Mach speed, it demands that you skim, scroll, and ski across a spray of surfacey sound bytes. And they have to be no more than sound bytes, of course, because we’re passing them like billboards lining the Indy 500.

E-mail is too wordy, time consuming. So we shave it down to a phrase or two on Facebook.

FB takes too long. So we distill it to Twitter’s 140 characters.

Yet with all the social platforms we’re managing, who has time for 140 anything?

So we Instagram. Because who needs words when a snap shot paints a thousand of them?

(Or so we think.)

Others are concerned as I am. In his utterly fascinating, The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that our brains are devolving to adapt to being dragged across the thin surface of visual image, bullet points, and maybe the occasionally well-wrought jingle. Jaron Lanier, in You Are Not A Gadget,considers what this high pitch surface velocity does to our sense of self, our place in humanity. And here, Edan Lepucki shares the experience of disconnecting (for a spell) from social media altogether.

What can we conclude? What can I learn from the personal proof that my own brain is jumpier, more staccato, and that my spirit is more jittery, more pinball-ish since “connecting” in several directions? What’s happening if I haven’t sunk into a dense work of true literary value in months? That, over the same time, I haven’t been able to conjure a single line of poetry?

For people who dive, water skiing can be frightening, alienating, not to mention exhausting. What if you’re the type that shrinks from gum-flapping velocity, hang-on-for-dear-life tautness, from hopping wakes at break neck speed, or zhwooping from point A to point Z? What if you want to write a poem about – and not just whizz past – the blurred landscape?

What if you feel most alive hunkering over the majesty and potency of words, tonguing them during long stretches of stone-like silence? What if you aren’t interested only in linear efficiency (getting from point A to Z), but are more invested in making (and expanding and elaborating on) a point? What if you long to dive into the deep end and discover the magic of those compressed realms?

If we are, as some argue, evolving into beings that write and think in txt msg abbrvs, will we lose our ability to read and write and live in ever-descending spirals, probing and penetrating the Otherworld? Will we in turn lose dimensions of our humanness? If the brusque slash-and-pin-prick of an exclamation point – the punctuation mark du jour – overrules the curved concentration of a question mark, what are we heading for?

What, in your opinion, are our options, besides letting go of the social media rope altogether? But wait! What would happen if we did? Would we sink, helpless and limpid, into the water? Into irrelevancy? Into oblivion?

With my new Facebook Page devoted exclusively to Global Mom: A Memoir, (release date: July 15th), I’m happy to be able to declare this website the space dedicated to things. . .

Global Mom: A Melissa.

Global Mom writes. . . of passage

Curious about the release of the book? Then go here, to Global Mom on Facebook, where this coming week I’m starting a vlog visit series with a string of other global moms. They have vastly contrasting stories, have lived in all corners of the planet, and have survived to tell you about it.

lunchin’ bunch o’ global moms

I’m also keeping you updated there on the ins and outs of recording the audio version of the book. Go to that address to be updated on all other booky stuff. Love your visits and appreciate your comments!

Then come here (like. . . truly, literally here-here, no hyperlink needed) for conversations with me about, yes, writing and being a global mom, but beyond that, what touches me as a person in this writing/living/nomadding lifetsyle. . .and everything else.

And there’s a bit of “else.”

Events, ideas, struggles, disappointments, mini-triumphs, local travel and on-the-ground responsibilities – all aspects of my behind-the-book personal life. This is the gamut of writing I’ve not adequately shared with you while I’ve been posting excerpts of the book or otherwise introducing you to the crew (publisher, editors, PR people) teaming up for Global Mom’s release.

What is “everything else”? Things related to:

1) Integrating in French-speaking Switzerland (Want to see why Switzerland is so clean? I’ll show you live footage of the guts of its garbage disposal system.)

summer over Lac Léman

Canton de Vaud, countryside

2) Negotiating yet another new school system (Who wants a seasoned insider’s peek at international schools? And do you want a quick-‘n’-dirty on the famed International Baccalaureate degree? What’s it like to educate your kids multilingually?)

German, French, Italian, English. But hold on – where’s the Romansch?

3) Raising teenaged boys on the global road (Make that a bumpy global road lately. . .I’ve been seriously wondering what in the world we were thinking signing up for this, and what we’ve done to our children.)

Luc takes up snowboarding

4) Having our daughter serve as a full-time missionary in Italy (From run-ins with the local Mafia in Sicily, to gypsies stoning her in Rome. Santa patata and honest to Pete.)

7) Visitors from abroad. If you follow me on Twitter (MDBGlobalMom), you know I just had some favorite relatives here. And soon I’ll host a whole gang of favorite friends. (One ultra-talented visitor will be here shooting the trailer for my book.)

8) My volunteer service overseeing a delightful group of the local leaders and adolescent girls of our church, all through the Geneva region and into parts of France. (Google-map it: from Chambéry, France, to Morges, Switzerland).

9) The signed contract to write a book with Randall on Strengthening Long Distance Marriages. (Coming in 2014)

10) And finally – and most sweetly – the signed contract to bring you my substantial book on Grief & Grace.(Watch for it: Memorial Day 2014)

. . .when I stood blinking in the movie theater after the final credits rolled. I wore cork platforms. I had a Toni home perm that I was trying to grow out. My date’s name was Clay. I’d been home fewer than 48 hours from living most of that past year in Austria. Maybe that fact – that I’d been out of the US loop for a while, residing on another planet, playing lonely goatherd near Salzburg – is the reason I said the following words as Clay and I got ready to leave the theater:

“Well, hmmm,” I mumbled, “I can tell you one thing: that thing’s never gonna catch on.”

Clay cocked his head, trying to check if I was joking. “But you didn’t even think those. . .those Stormtroopers were–?”

Head shake.

“And not even Princess Leah?”

Smirk.

“What about Han Solo? Don’t you think he was-?”

Contorted, noncommittal, wrinkled Calvinist librarian grimace.

“Oh, come on! Not even that little – what was his name? C3P0? But that was pure genius!”

Dead pan glare.

“Mark my words,” I said with disdain and self-assurance, “The soundtrack’s good, yeah. But the rest? It’ll never catch on.”

Forget that my flippancy was an insult to my date who’d just paid for my opening night ticket. Forget that I made him awkward. That I then felt awkward. I squirmed a bit in that windy gape of silence, teetering on my cork platforms, fluffing the frayed ends of my Toni perm.

I just don’t seem to get the genius of some things. And a lot of those things end up spinning the planet.

For instance, I remember 20 years after Star Wars when a friend told me that the “next wave, Melissa – watch for it, it’s coming fast – the next wave,” she said, “is technology.”

“Aeck,” I said. “You really think so? Aeck [again], I hope not.”

In those days, I wrote (by hand, on onion skin paper, with special pens and in gorgeous calligraphy) epistles to my friends. I resisted my first computer. My second one. My third. When friends’ responses to my handwrought letters popped up on my PC screen, I thought they looked as personal as ingredient lists on a cereal box. Sterile, generic, dehumanizing sound bytes.

pcmusuem

I clutched my fountain pen in defiance. I licked postage stamps until I got drunk on the glue.

But it didn’t take long to realize that as a writer, my quaint Thoreauvian methods of communicating just weren’t going to cut it in a rapidly changing world. So I capped my pen, shelved my envelopes, plugged my nose, and dove into email.

This was my technobility friend, one whose career has kept her steeped in that cyberocean since the days it was no more than a puddle. For years, she’d been following our global life through me (on parchment, then, when I caved, via email), and was trying, I dunno, to oil me up for the 21st century.

I balked. Blog.BLOG? It sounded like a bloated trunk of a hacked down Sycamore rotting in an eddy of the Mississippi Delta. Never on your life. It couldn’t be real writing, I protested. Besides, from all (the 3 blogs) I’d sampled, it was too exhibitionist, intrusive, prone to much-too-long daily dwelling in one’s own head. (Don’t these folks have jobs?, I thought. Families? Obligations? Water meters to read?)

And so here I am. And here you obviously are. I’m doing this blog thing with conviction and exuberance, while also doing my job, loving my family, fulfilling my obligations (like significant ones I carry within my beloved church). And I’ve not yet neglected our water meter.

“Alors, Qui Ici N’est Pas Encore Mon FRIEND Sur FACEBOOK?”

wired.co.uk

As with Star Wars, email and then blogs, I initially winced at the drug called Facebook. But now I’m a dealer. At church. It was last night, in fact, in our church parking lot after a big activity with my sweet Swiss and French charges, that I called out: “So, who here’s not yet my Friend on Facebook?”

Nearly every last person was. Facebook’s become not only the mechanism that keeps my personal self interconnected globally, but it’s also the portal through which my professional self shares her voice and gathers a readership. (You). And it’s where you can offer me feedback and invaluable reader’s insights. You cannot fully appreciate how much I love your feedback!

(Haven’t visited the Global Mom: A MemoirFB page? Bah, voilà: Click right here and be sure to “like” it.)

My little Twitter avatar. Thanks again for the photo, Luc.

Crystal, Kim, and Chirpster

Email? Blogs? Facebook? How far can a former technophobe possibly slide down the slippery social network slope?

My two PR mavens have taught me. Crystal and Kim at BookSparks are the minds behind my book’s summer release campaign. (Still pinching myself, honestly, that there’s a team so invested in making my words fly. And yes, I fawn all over their expertise). They have events in the works for NYC, Utah and LA, and have hoisted me onto various social media platforms. This is why I’m now linked to Chirpster (Oh. You call it Twitter? Hm. That’s cute.) And am cuckooing every day. Join in, if you want, at MDBGlobalMom.

Between this blog, the Global Mom: A Memoir FB page, and Twitter, you’re bound to bump into me on a daily basis. I’m signing off here so I can go work on some promotional pieces I’m writing for Crystal and Kim, and so I can also go edit the first installment of my Global Moms vlog series, which you can access on my YouTube Channel or the Global Mom: A Memoir FB page.

As long as you’re here, how about a vlog clip? Watch. Leave a comment. Tell me what you think, what you would change to improve this piece, and what questions you would ask mothers like myself who live this kind of internationally nomadic life.